By Anthony Ballas.
[title] is both more and less than a novella; but mostly more. Caustic, biting, brutal, puzzling and punishing. Riddled with lapses, pockmarked with gaps and schisms, though overdetermined with nearly any and every cliché and esoteric allusion imaginable, [title] is too much and too little, a surplus of negativity, an excess of void. [title] refuses to stand still, its pages quivering restlessly between its covers, its scope unbounded despite only 87 pages.
And yet, [title] is a surprisingly lucid experimental satire. Of all the references, jokes, allusions, nods, jabs, and alike, the book’s anonymous author mostly targets prestige fiction, and the insular, self-enclosed universe of high-literary culture more generally: literary prizes, top-tier lit mags, the turnstyle of MFA mentors and mentees in and out of creative writing programs, prestigious imprints from publishing houses both large and small. [name of author] is hyper aware of the low-stakes, character-driven, first-person solipsism, and plotless narratives common to prestige fiction, narratives which generally limp along in a mumblecore-like stupor before stumbling upon some final, pathos-laden and sigh-inducing epiphany. The prestige industry specializes in digestible, inconsequential vignettes in which the bourgeois individual is safely camouflaged against a homogenous narrative backdrop. It’s an industry where we might expect the word “laureate” to most likely appear today.
[title]’s title page signals to the reader that they hold a nuclear missile trained on the prestige-industrial-complex in their hands: published by an “[Independent “Prestige” Press]” from a “[Second-Tier Metropolis],” its cover design, layout and printing “[outsourced],” and copyedited by an “[overworked intern]” in a “[nation in the late stages of empire].” [title] casts prestige’s tropes and tendencies in the negative, exposing its pretensions with critical and philosophical boldness.
[name of author] renders [title]’s central character in silhouette, offering the reader only a partial view while taunting us though a second-person address: “You’ll want his hair, eyes and skin colored in, informing a visage of tone and contour. You’ll want his build built (will want his body). You’ll want a measure of “flesh” and won’t be satisfied until you get it.” The reader is never satisfied, never can be, and probably never has been. But the satisfaction of reading [title] is precisely the way our readerly desires are self-consciously withheld: we want what we don’t have (nothing), and [title] gives us precisely this nothing in return.
Although the book’s central character, aptly named Protagonist, is devoid of attributes, [name of author] plays on our readerly prejudices, turning our attention to “pronominal evidence” which suggests that our generic Protagonist is most likely an English-speaking male. Protagonist, an apparently amorphous “man of mystery,” hidden behind a clever literary veil, is rather ironically coded as just another white boy. The book makes us hesitate about our readerly pretensions, predispositions and expectations, all in service of shaking us from our dogmatic commitments to the saturated whiteness and anglophonic centricity of high literary culture. [title]’s satire is potent.
The narrative (if it indeed is a narrative) takes the reader through cryptic moments from Protagonist’s life. Episodes are often offered asynchronously, with Protagonist inhabiting a spatially and temporally discontinuous, almost incomplete universe. Entire chapters have vanished, dialogue has been redacted, and conflict, “the novel’s sine qua non” as [name of author] puts it, has been evacuated. Diegetic reality is broken, reduced to a ruin.
Protagonist is confined between the four walls of his “well-lighted room,” trapped in a literal prisonhouse of language, with its literature-lined walls and papered-over windows (“yellow wallpaper” is mentioned at one point) resembling a Borgesian library, a labyrinth of literary and linguistic infinity. The room simultaneously symbolizes fiction as panoptic, a monastic cell, and/or a Leibnizean monad — it is windowless after all. “Well-lighted room,” [name of author] writes, is also “an implied microcosm of that [volatile transatlantic region/urban battleground/Late Capitalist den of thieves] where [antipathy of opposing factions/homicidal bigotry/Mammon worship] has resulted in so much human suffering.” In other words, pick your allegory like you pick your poison.
Most of the book’s action (if we can call it action) takes place (if it even takes place at all) in this well-lighted room. Here, Protagonist rises from his chair and sometimes paces back and forth — or at least we imagine these things in our “mind’s eye.” “The scene feels a bit staged,” [name of author] openly admits, and since “(there’s no there there)” it’s entirely possible that Protagonist “has been strutting and fretting in a theatrical void.” Character and setting alike are equally unorientable.
Protagonist visits his Progenitors, has a tryst with Significant Other (though we’ll later find out — in the form of a Lacanian aphorism — “there is no Significant Other”), and runs an errand of some kind (though we’re never told where or what). He also has a redacted dialogue with an acquaintance at a grocery store while looking over “trompe l’oeil (faux meat) hamburger patties.” Everything is given the patina of unknowability while also paradoxically, perhaps parasitically, attached to a surplus of meaning (there’s an “orange ‘orange,’” an “avant garde treadmill,” and so on). Are these episodes flashbacks, fantasies, “allusion, illusion, memory or dream?” [name of author] either doesn’t give an inch or maybe doesn’t give a shit. Either way, I found myself fully invested in finding out.
It may be tempting to read Protagonist’s four-walled prison/cell/monad/cosmos as a commentary on the isolation experienced during COVID-19 lockdowns, and the trauma of being trapped alone, like Protagonist, with the covers of our unread personal libraries menacing us from their bookshelf perches. This lure is part of the book’s sophistication. We can speculate all we want, though each time we do so we risk falling into [name of author]’s trap: every trail runs dry, nearly every line in the book points to something other than itself, as, sentence by sentence, objects and allusions, actions and inactions, transform themselves into so many cul-de-sacs of meaning — grooves of negativity proliferating as “nots [sic] in the narrative thread prove Gordian.” Each ladder rung snaps underfoot. Every foothold, quicksand. “This novel is riddled with writing,” [title] warns us. Whoever [name of author] is, at least they’re an honest liar.
[title] is also a tidal wave of allusions. A Brownian motion of reference sealed inside of a vacuum chamber, with everything falling at the same rate and velocity be it literary, cinematic, photographic, philosophical, religious, or otherwise. Here, a Proustian anamnesis, and there a Cassevetes’ film. Hegel’s landlord. Dickens. Francis Bacon (but which one?). Henry James. Rembrandt. Poe. W.C. Williams. A buried allusion to Shylock’s pound of flesh, Othello’s handkerchief, Macbeth’s phantom daggers, the creeping and petty pace of time, Confederacy of Dunces, Gogol’s “Overcoat,” Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Community, 70s gritty realism, The Wizard of Oz, T.S. Eliot, Magritte, and so on. These last few, from Macbeth on, only account for a mere two pages. (Not to mention [title]’s central stylistic device, its use of brackets, which appear on nearly every page — a perfectly sane use of the Husserlian epoché).
By way of allusion, [title] has something for everyone; from Frieda Kahlo to Henry Darger, the most recognizable to the most arcane. The book is an “exo-textual café” — there is nothing outside of the text because everything has already been brought into [title]’s voracious orbit. By inundating the reader with allusions, [name of author] may be giving a nod to one of the ways prestige fiction invents its prestige: importing its meaning from elsewhere with the tenor of an overzealous undergraduate, indiscriminately name-dropping to get the grade.
Some of [title]’s more comical allusions appear as skillfully crafted polysemic clusters. Protagonist’s “The Ottoman,” we’re told, resembles “though [does] not represent” Suleyman the Magnificent, his simulacrum stitched into fabric as though it were fit for a postmodern museum exhibition. The Ottoman is also a self-consciously heavy-handed allusion to Fitzgerald; its beaming gaze keeping watch over Protagonist like the all-seeing eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleberg. And [name of author] even folds the Author into the mix , “who, in turn, may be confused with the Ottoman’s imposing image.” Ottoman teeters on the verge of cliché and esoteric, profound and glib all at once; a marriage/mirage of Said’s Orientalism and Baudrillard’s “stucco angel.” [name of author] virtuosically cinches its forms together into a clatter of low- and high-brow hybrids and stylistic monstrosities. It’s a wonder to behold.
[title] not only takes aim at prestige fiction but also what we might call “prestige theory,” namely the trendy object-oriented philosophies and neovitalisms of the last decade or so, which allege to have found a way beyond the “discursive cage” of language and subjectivity, preferring a privileged, immediate access to things-in-themselves. The so-called “object turn” is not unlike prestige fiction, insofar as both have become safe havens for bourgeois perspectives to huddle together in a land of impersonal affect, political impotence, and general vapidity.
Composed as a list of Protagonist’s possessions, Chapter 62 reads as a commentary on this trend; a “Wunderkammer” teeming with literary heirlooms seemingly plucked at random from literary history:
handcrafted little goldfish, dental cufflinks,
lemon soap, coffee spoons, lobster leash,
caged songbird, nymphalidae blue butterfly,
real toads, jaws of a she shark, wooden leg,
Japanese pillow, cartographer’s desert journal,
[…]
flask of mescal, cask of Amontillado,
empty grail, petals on a wet black bough, cold
plums, gooseberries, sundried raisin, moly,
madeleine, ouija board, the winter garden
photograph, vile of hemlock, length of rope,
razor blade, shotgun, generous dose of mor-
phine and a pocketful of stones fished from
the River Ouse
This list repeats the same stylistic device often employed by object theorists, who naively think that lists of objects demonstrate the spontaneous, horizontal relations between heterogenous objects without the stain of subjectivity marring their otherwise pristine ontological statuses. [name of author] smuggles in a trenchant critique of these philosophical fads. What agency other than a human subject would be capable of assembling such a list on the page in the first place? Who puts objects into a sequence, an order, a syntax? What vehicles other than language and writing make lists possible? The vitalists and object theorists will have a hell of a time unpainting themselves from this corner.
What is fiction anyway but a collective fantasy, one that retains its familiarity across time and space through subjective constitution, perpetrated and perpetuated by authors, critics, readers, and so on? [title]’s Wunderkammer puts the profound hubris of this brand of philosophy on full display. Ironically, it takes an apparently authorless text like [title] to avenge the human subject against these contemporary posthuman impulses. In under a page and a half, [name of author] does more to dismantle the blogospheric idols of latter-day Heideggarian “realism” than perhaps any other source, driving a stake through the heart of the object-oriented ontology for good (let’s hope!).
I found the experience of reading [title] similar to that of reading Urs Allemann’s Babyficker. Both are single-room dramas, isolation narratives, equipped with a critical eye toward certain capitalistic entrapments (though certainly [name of author] doesn’t employ quite the same disturbing extended metaphor as Allemann). [title] is also part Perec, part Beckett, part Barth and Barthes, among others. There is also a shared satirical and experimental kinship between [title] and the late works of David Markson, This is Not a Novel and The Last Novel. Markson composed these works out of biographical materials and references from all over literary history. [title] is organized through a similar inter- and extra-textual weaving; a novella from one angle and a literary index from another, neither classification capable of containing it. [title] presents itself as something more like “conversation cum literary criticism,” as it’s put in a late chapter. This fiction/criticism hybrid alone is enough to set Northrop Frye’s head spinning in violent disagreement.
If we think [title] is a “postmodern” gimmick for these reasons or others, we’ve again fallen into its trap. The brilliance of this novel is indeed the way [name of author] risks gimmick; unburdened from (auto)biography and unmoored from convention and expectation, [title] is the fictional equivalent to a Rube Goldberg machine with most of its connections and pathways severed, making its perpetual motion appear impossible and therefore sublime. Eppur si muove…
The machine culminates in a wonderfully bathetic finalé where Protagonist “tonsures his styrofoam skull,” revealing himself to be some kind of artificial holy man or hermetic mannequin alone in his “make-believe monastery.” We’re told that Protagonist has tonsured his skull “in solidarity with Author who’s en route to an involuntary tonsure,” and so something tells me this revelation doubles as a confessional, as though [name of author] were giving us a glimpse inside of their own private Golgotha. Is this parallel a strange sort of self-castration or crucifixion? An acknowledgment of [name of author]’s self-effacement? If so, [title] seems to stage the “death of the author” as more of a zombification than a funeral. [title] is a Krzhizhanovskyan autobiography, its author hungry and hunting for more like “the still growing fingernails of a corpse…scrap[ing] a figurative barrel bottom in search of significant images for what seems like (will have been) a lifetime finally, until finding himself at a loss.” [title] transforms the death of the author into the death drive of the author; [name of author], after all, bears an uncanny resonance to Lacan’s “Name of the Father,” lingering in a state of symbolic immortality after physical death. Sure, the author is dead, but do they know that they’re dead? Does the book know that it has come to a close?
[name of author]’s rumination on death reminds me of Saramago’s own, that “death has this strange beauty of being as lucid as a mathematical demonstration, as straightforward as drawing a line between two points, so long as it does not exceed the length of the ruler.” [name of author] eschews this metric, refusing to align with the typical parameters of the book form, with authorship, character, genre, and nearly everything else. Is [title] an audacious debut? Or is it a posthumous masterpiece, meticulously edited by a team of scholars and archivists? Brimming with wit and intrigue, [title] provokes the kinds of questions only a literary hoax of this sophistication and magnitude is capable of.
Sublunary Editions’ book design for [title] is also worth noting. Its matte black cover and minimalist, nondescript white typeface jut out like a miniature headstone. Any title whatsoever might grace its cover, and any author can be substituted for another — a bit like a template for the prestige industry. [title] performs obsequies for the everchanging same of prestige fiction: HERE LIES LIES, it seems to suggest, superimposing epigraph and epitaph onto its blank surface.
I can’t conclude without commenting on the presence of Hegel in [title]. [name of author] condenses Hegel and Dickens’s Christmas ghosts, looming over the protagonist in a state of stubborn omnipresence. Prestige fiction is given a similar treatment by [name of author] as Hegel gives religious thinking: a barren skeleton with little scraps of paper stuck to it. The prestige industry is a little self-enclosed religious community with blurbs and write-ups stuck on its body. Its rituals, its icons and altars commented on and passed down through a spiritual lineage of MFA alumni, canonized and beatified in so many sacred journals, magazines, and presses, as [title]’s back cover testifies: “Perfunctory mentor blurb,” “Prestige by association blurb,” “Conceptual buzz words blurb.” Just as Protagonist strikes his fist through the “papal portrait” papered over his window, [name of author] punches a hole through this ritual, delivering a blow to the glossy sheen of the New Yorker, the catholic church of prestige publishing.
You can read an excerpt of [title] here.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anthony Ballas is a researcher and critic exploring race, class politics, and internationalism in literature, film, music, architecture, and philosophy. His writing has appeared in Philosophy of World Democracy, Journal of Visual Art Practice, Middle West Review, Canadian Review of American Studies, and elsewhere. He teaches philosophy and humanities at Northern New Mexico College.
